Jonathan Escoffery's most recent honors include a Distinguished Story selection in Best American Short Stories 2018, a 2018 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, and the 2016 Waasnode Fiction Prize. He has received fellowships and support from the Somerville Arts Council, The Writers' Room of Boston, Kimbilio Fiction, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His writing has been selected to appear in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, The Caribbean Writer, Passages North, Salt Hill Journal, Solstice Literary Magazine, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and elsewhere. Jonathan earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of Minnesota. He teaches creative writing courses at GrubStreet and is the co-Writer-in-Residence at Wellspring House artist retreat in Ashfield, MA..

Shubha Sunder was a 2016 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Her fiction has appeared in numerous journals, among them Crazyhorse, where it won the 2015 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize; Narrative Magazine, where it was a winner of "30 Below," Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Bangalore Review. Two of her stories were named notables in the Best American Short Stories 2015 anthology. She lives in Boston, MA, where she is an instructor at GrubStreet and Associate Fiction Editor at West Branch. She recently completed a novel set in her hometown of Bangalore, India..

Colwill Brown is the Writer-in-Residence at Wellspring House in Massachusetts, Editor at GrubStreet creative writing center in Boston, Fiction Editor at Pangyrus magazine, and a recipient of the work-study “waiter” scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Seaton Graduate Award in Creative Writing at Kansas State University, and the Henry Blackwell Essay Prize. Colwill’s work has appeared in Solstice Literary Magazine, The Conium Review, Poetry & Audience, and other places, and is anthologized in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet (Press 53). Find out more at colwillbrown.com.

Stacy Mattingly is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, an Atlanta hostage story now a feature film, Captive. Stacy's writing has appeared in the Oxford American, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, EuropeNow, and elsewhere. In 2012, she launched the Sarajevo Writers' Workshop in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later helped lead the first Narrative Witness exchange (Caracas-Sarajevo) for the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. An Atlanta native, Stacy teaches creative writing at both Boston University, where she received an MFA in fiction, and GrubStreet, and she is assistant professor at Berklee College of Music. Her recently completed first novel is set in the present-day Balkans. .

Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born poet, literary translator, and author of Bread on Running Waters (2013). Her translation from the Albanian of Negative Space by Luljeta Lleshanaku published in 2018 by New Directions in the US and Bloodaxe Books in the UK was Poetry Book Society’s Recommended Translation. Gjika has also translated Kosovar poet Xhevdet Bajraj’s play, Slaying the Mosquito (Laertes, 2017) and collaborated with Alice Whitmore in translating his chapbook of poems, We Fall Like Children(Laertes, 2018). She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. A graduate of Boston University’s MFA program where she received the Robert Fitzgerald Translation Prize, Gjika teaches ESL at Massachusetts International Academy, as well as writing and literary translation at Framingham State University, and Grub Street.

Dariel Suarez is a Cuban-born writer who immigrated to the United States with his family in 1997. He earned his MFA in fiction at Boston University, where he was a Global Fellow, and has taught creative writing at Boston University, the Boston Arts Academy, and is now the Head of Faculty and Curriculum at GrubStreet. Dariel’s writing has received honors or awards from The Caribbean Writer, Glimmer Train, and Nimrod International’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. His prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Third Coast, Southern Humanities Review, and The Florida Review. Dariel’s story collection, A KIND OF SOLITUDE, was a finalist for the New American Press Fiction Prize and the Autumn House Press Fiction Contest, and his first novel, THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HOUSE, set in his native Cuba, is currently on submission along with the collection.

Tara Skurtu, born in Key West, Florida, is a two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania (Eyewear, 2016) and the full collection The Amoeba Game (Eyewear, 2017). She lives and teaches in Bucharest.